Revising Ingrained Reactions

[jsburbidge]

A couple of weeks ago I was shopping for groceries in my local Loblaws, which is formally quite serious about COVID-19 protocols - no personal shopping bags, aisles marked one way, disinfectant at the door, etc. - and I noticed something emblematic of what I see far more generally around me. The customers were, in general, following most of the rules (except being rather poor at one-way lane observation), but I passed a cluster of employees - one restocking, two involved in filling online orders - who were interacting at far less than a two-metre distance. It would have been fair to call them a clump.

I see this more generally - co-workers standing or sitting together as though there were no pandemic to be worried about. That one stuck in my mind as particularly egregious (especially as they were blocking the aisle).

It seems to be a specific case of our primate brains kicking in with a basic rule that "friends won't hurt you, strangers might". We're built to let down our guard around people whom we see as being part of our immediate tribe.

The rule is reversed in the case of a pathogen like the SARS-Cov2 virus. Leaving aside venues like barbers, nail salons, dentists, tattoo parlours, and crowded bars, you're less likely to get the disease from a stranger - typically, short exposure, more of a distance, unlikely to be repeated, at more than arm's length - than you are from someone you know.

(That isn't no risk, just less risk: "community transmission" is how the virus jumps between social groups.)

Unless you know that co-workers have just had negative tests for COVID-19, you should actually be more cautious about them rather than less so, including procedures such as wiping down shared tools and assigning one person to tasks where two might have been assigned jointly in the past

The same goes for friends. Even if you have a "closed" social circle, almost everyone in such a circle will have some potential sources of outside exposure - work, travel, shopping. (A few exceptions do exist. My 86-year-old mother just spent over 100 days with no face-to-face contact with anyone but my father.) If you live in the same place, you're basically by definition in the same boat, but in an "enlarged" social circle, where two or more households are involved, you still need to be cautious: unless you meet only for barbecues, you're probably interacting (a) inside, (b) for more than 15 minutes, and (c) in reasonably close proximity.

Humans are malleable. We can learn to behave differently from how we did in the past. It's time to start overlaying the old instinctive reaction with learned revisions.

Comments

[graydon]

Somebody did a study on a large high school and the social graph for its seniors having sex with each other.

Anybody who has seen the resulting connection graph -- where the great majority of the students having sex doing so with one or two partners and yet half of the school population is in one tree -- knows just how effective "close social circle" won't be in constraining spread of the disease.

So, you're right, in that we need to change our habits. But actual spread prevention for anything indoors is going to take fundamental process changes.

(And the "reduced chance of transmission out doors" is reduced, not eliminated; it may have more to do with the UV component of sunlight than anything else. I suspect we're going to have a spreading incident at an outdoor hockey game this winter sometime.)

[jsburbidge]

Mixture of UV and airflow reducing density of infectious droplets, if it's anything like the pattern with TB. (Admittedly the susceptibility of COV-19 to UV seems to be less than that of TB. There's a reason that the Victorians had lots of consumption, what with heavy drapes on windows and an indoors lifestyle.)

Every difference behaviour can make with the current pathogen, other than strict isolation, is reducing rather than eliminating risk. Fir public health purposes that's frequently sufficient.

I am currently looking at the curves for the southern states, factoring in the fact that even prompt interventions will take a month or so to really show up in the numbers, noting that nobody really looks like making anything gesturing in the direction of sufficient interventions - have you looked at the politics in NC? - and expecting large-scale civil unrest south of the Mason-Dixin line fairly soon.

[graydon]

We are so lucky this is a fragile virus, yeah. Though the folks looking into UV are using the "must wear eye protection" values of UV, so it's not especially helpful if all office space has to be lit with grow lights.

You're totally correct about sufficient but I don't think it's going to work in PR terms as the morbidity information starts getting filled in and publicised. I think polio is going to be a better analogy than TB; if you live, you will be damaged. (Which for people who had severe enough cases to notice does seem to be fairly close to an accurate statement.) The degree of freaking out about polio was extensive. An endemic, get-it-again, all-ages polio is going to put a lot of strain on already questionable constructions of legitimacy.

I pay a bit of attention to NC politics through following Ursula Vernon's tweets, so yes. The Banksian "outside context problem" comes to mind; authority solves social problems, not material ones. People think it does because material problems with customary solutions reduce to social, but this is a mistake. And authority has no other answers; authoritarian systems are removed, they don't alter in substance.

Might go so far as to say they've got large-scale civil unrest in the sunbelt now; whether they tip right over into a general insurrection will be interesting, as is the mythological status accorded to Trump's indifference to Russian bounties on American military personnel.